Eventide

by Kent Haruf (Knopf; $24.95)

This bleak, compassionate book takes up where the author’s widely acclaimed novel “Plainsong” left off, in the windy high-plains country in and around the tiny town of Holt, Colorado. Distress is general: out on their ranch, two stolid elderly brothers discover loneliness after the wayward girl they took in leaves for college; various troubles—illness, death, basic inability to cope—afflict the adults in town; and some young children are set adrift from disintegrating homes, with dangerous consequences. Every action in Holt casts a long shadow, and the gist of Haruf’s story is what happens when those shadows touch. (The results are equal parts grace and calamity.) It’s rare that such slow, deliberate prose is this highly charged, but Haruf’s writing draws power from his sense of character—its limitations and its possibilities—and how it propels action.♦